In this video I want to show you an introduction to using task grids. This is a tool that we learned
from Ryan Singer on one of our coaching calls and there's some other videos you can go in and watch
the detailed explanation of this, but I'm going to give you the quick version here just to get
you started. And the task grid, if you look kind of at our process, is going to happen after we've
done the framing, we've shaped it up, we've kind of got a really good idea of the breadboarding,
and we've gone through FigJam, then we've got to even prototype some things, and now we're
getting ready to, okay, I think we're ready to start doing the work. So the task grid is a way
to break the project into a bunch of different scopes. It's a very simple tool and I'll show
you kind of how it works. First we use a tool called monstermap.app. This is a free tool that
is created by Ryan and his team and you can just go in here and create new and say test project
here. We always want to name the project whatever the name is in Notion. That project name that we
use in Notion and toggle, just keep it all the same, make everybody's life a little easier.
We are going to share this with the rest of the team, so you want to make sure that we go up to
here to share. You can make this a shareable link and you can copy that link now and put that into
Notion so everybody can get to it. And you'll see in Notion here that we have a specific field for
the task grid, so that way when you open up a project you can with one click jump right back
into that project. And here all we're going to do is set up these different pieces of the project.
So we may have an auth section and here we need to set up, you know, Google auth. Here we also need to,
you know, create the UI. Then we need to test for, you know, email address, whatever here. You can
start to make your little list. This is really a scratch pad and then we go into this and say, hey,
we need, you know, to have this, you know, content table built out and we need, you know,
whatever the UI is going to be, the API routes. You kind of break it into all of your specific
tasks. This is really up to you. This is not for me or for anyone else on the team other than
the person actually building the work. And we're sort of breaking these things into little pieces.
And I'll show you a piece here. This was a project where we took the Innovo dashboard
and moved it into, from a React app into a Next.js app. So my first step was building all
the prompts out. So I reviewed instructions. I created the AI friendly PRD and then actually
ran those tasks. So I, you know, moved to new branch. These are just like my little scratch
pad just to make sure I didn't miss anything. Because you tend to hold all this in your brain
and having it put down into a paper like this is helpful. So you can kind of see how it works. And
each of these steps have, you know, progress. You can put them in review in progress or just
mark them as done. And you can also take the grids and just kind of move them around. You
can even take tasks and move them between the grid here as well. This is a great way just to
kind of get ideas. You can put things like, I'm going to do this first and that, then that or
whatever. And the other piece here that is helpful is you can put things as, hey, this piece is very
unknown. I'm just putting a warning on it. Like I'm flagging it so that when I look at this,
this is kind of gives me this feeling like, hey, I should, you know, probably spend more time on
this. And there's some, you know, complicated stuff in here. And you can see, we moved these
specific pages over. Then I checked all the off pieces. Then we went to like, make sure that when
you're an admin role, you can see these few different pages. And if you're in a team role,
you can see those pages and so forth. So you get a quick overview, even if you don't know the
details of this project, you can kind of see like, hey, there's, you know, seven different items and
six are done, right? So it kind of gives a good idea of where we're at in the project.
Another example was this DM group, creating a group direct message in tribe. So we had,
you know, various components we had to update. And then there's some refactoring that had to
take place and so forth. And the other little nomenclature we use is this tilde. If things are
like, if we have time to get back to, we have extra time in the project, this is a sort of a
nice to have. It's a, hey, maybe we'll do this. We may refactor a file upload. We ended up not
doing it for this particular project. And so this is just a tool to use between us internally. As,
you know, little things get dropped in Slack or on a call, you can quickly pull this up. Just make
sure we capture things in a one screen view. So that's Task Grid. It's how you connect it to
Notion and a very helpful tool as we start to scope up the project and even take this piece
and you can use this to get ready for the AI friendly PRD.